I'd say on balance forum members would say that the iphone is no match for the BB in the phone and email stakes, but for music/video in the sacred words of MC Hammer "you can't touch this". Yes apple have striped out the phone functions and are doing what they do best.

i knew it was going to go down like it did today. leave it to apple to make those that bought the overpriced iphone @ $500-$650 just 2 months ago, to keep their silence (without telling people there's more to come soon)......so when the new products were released today and the prices adjusted along with tweaks to the existing iphone line, and the drop in price of $ 200 just to make those that bought it 2 months ago feel like suckers. apple always does this, and they are masters at it. they change hardware and prices faster than you can change your underwear (metaphor, of course)....

i had a glance @ their new items and prices. i would NEVER pay $ 400 for a 16 gb ipod. they think they can "hook" people on the interface, do you really feel that having it is worth you working a full day or a full week to get that experience ? I don't. in the next year you will see most new electronics like tv's car stereos, etc. will already come with big enough hard drives built-in so that you can chose how and where you want your media.....

the only good thing to come out of apple's moves over the past 5 yrs is the AAC music format, which is really superior to MP3. IMO that's the only real worth that got me to use itunes and an ipod to carry my entire music collection. and now that storage is getting more abundant, i think i may move away from lossy and reburn my collection in full WAV.

sakman they did put out a 160gb ipod, that could hold alot of WAV files.

anyways everyone has their opinions but 16gb was obviously the largest flash drive they could put in it (supply). you add web browsing, youtube and wireless music store and i think it will sell. They will up the storage when the supplier ups their capacity.

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"A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history - with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila." - unknown

i personally think the ipod touch is well overdue.....i mean once the iphone came out it was only obvious that a new ipod with similar features was on the horizon, but yet for myself im gonna wait until and 80gb version or higher comes out for the iphone....i should've never got my hopes up and expected a 30gb or higher memory ipod upon first release, and i myself have over 40gb of music so until the "Touch" reaches higher memory, i'm jus gonna sit back and enjoy my 80gb....

What a ripoff. Apple should work on making what they have better instead of coming out with more random junk.

I'm actually kind of impressed that there's now an ultrathin 8mm PDA with 320x480 resolution, 8GB flash, 3D accelerator chip, H264 video playback hardware, and a shatter-resistant touchscreen, all in a $299 package. Compare that to a Dell Axim X51 handheld computer, the iPod Touch has impressive specs in many areas and the pricing is pretty good for such impressive hardware specifications.

The iPod Touch, being PDA like with superior specs and thinness, sounds like it would blow away an iPaq for the use as a PDA, handheld photo viewer, video player, etc. No removable memory card slot, but that can be worked around by using WiFi transfer instead (using a laptop as a jumping point)

The question is: How soon can it be hacked?

Granted, not everyone has a use for these things, but I'd love to use an iPod Touch in non-iPod ways. And NOT as a BlackBerry replacement...

Good article and he is definitley right. Only thing I think is that alot of the people who are buying episodes of these shows are also very capable of getting them off bittorent. I used to do that and their are automated ways of getting the newest episodes the morning they air, add free to that and it will be tough to justify 4.99.

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"A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history - with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila." - unknown

i like my iPod because it does what i want it to pretty well, if like it to do more, but whatever. Also itunes allowed me to discover music and movies that i otherwise would have not heard of or had limited access to. But i guess that perspective of apple as a company washed away after they started to release products faster than most ppl could absorb what was current already. For me that realization came when i bought my first iPod 4G.

no, it was not when i bought my first ipod, it was when i bought my first and only iMac in 04. reason i did it was to seriously and honestly give Apple a shot @ my personal computing experience. @ first i loved it, it was much simpler than Windows (which I'm a 15+ yr veteran of MS OS's). after which time i bought an ipod and started to populate itunes with music. when i found that ipods worked with aftermarket car stereos, I jumped on the wagon to be able to carry my entire music collection on a portable device as large as maybe 10 cd's stacked on eachother.

yeah...it was awesome, until every 2-4 months or so Apple changed prices/updated hardware, and i started feeling like a sucker for buying what i did at the price i had to pay. even more of an upset was how Apple was very "rigid" both in the way they design something, and in the limited number of things on the stuff i bought from them that can be customized. that's where MS takes all the credit, because they have so many options and tools, that it's a brand of software for the masses. out of all this, i later realized that Apple was incorrectly touted as being a more secure and stable platform, which it is clearly NOT (check percentages of updates released per unit time per amount of software being used). and that every single thing that apple does, it does as part of a cloaking schema to ever so incrimentally point people towards apple's favor, as they try to do this in a way where ppl will not realize it until apple becomes a super-conglomerate-mega-monopoly (i.e. when it's too late, and they dominate the planet).